Review: Legion by Brandon Sanderson

Brandon Sanderson just won a Hugo for his novella The Emperor’s Soul. Looking for an electronic copy of that I also found this novella, Legion. The version of the cover in the middle above is by Jon Foster, for the Subterranean Press edition. The other 2 are the eBook covers designed by Isaac Stewart. I read the red version, an epub. The blue version is what shows up on amazon for the kindle.

This is a great reading experience because of what Sanderson has done with the abnormal mind of the point of view character. We have here something similar to, but a bit more dramatic than, a functional schizophrenic. Legion is a collection of eccentric (and a bit crazy in their own right) geniuses crammed into the mind of an otherwise seemingly ordinary man. He sees them as hallucinations and lives in a large house with many rooms so that he has space to put them away when he doesn’t need them. I immediately thought back to the schizophrenic character in Blindsight by Peter Watts. Sanderson’s description of Legion’s various hallucinations is sort of how I imagined that character from Blindsight might see the world if we’d gotten her point of view.

The MacGuffin has potential. A fun device which plays with the tropes of time travel while keeping our ensemble of a protagonist firmly rooted in the present. The science vs religion debate is a heavy topic to handle in an otherwise rather light thriller. Ultimately the simplistic plot is overshadowed by the interesting characters in the narrator’s head and the unanswered questions beg for the story to be continued. I’ll be watching for a future volume.

I’ll leave you with 2 related bits (sort of from the “truth is stranger than fiction” department), a Ted talk about Schizophrenia: